During 4 weeks of my time at Designation, I worked with two other designers to create a digital product to connect donors and nonprofits. Our final product was Change: an app that connects to users bank accounts and credit cards and rounds up all purchases to the nearest dollar. After a preset amount of time, the user can choose an organization to donate to using the search and suggestion tools.
Click here to see the final prototype.
We needed to know how nonprofits successfully obtained donations and where they struggled, and we needed to know how and why people donate.
I took the lead in approaching people in cafes and food courts to ask about people’s experiences donating. We also arranged interviews with nonprofit administrators and workers to gain insights into their efforts to gain donations.
Our research showed that people donated to specific charities based on their emotional connection with the organization and their alignment with the charity’s mission.
On the other hand, nonprofits were having trouble attracting new donors. The workers expressed how difficult it was to gain trust and recognition, especially among small or mid-sized organizations that were competing against well known organizations like the Red Cross.
At this point, we had a lot of useful information, but we ran into a problem. Our research showed us how people picked specific organizations for their gifts, but it didn’t tell us why people decided to give in the first place. Without knowing why people donate, there was no way to design a product that appealed to their motivations and attract new donors. We had to gather more information and address our assumptions before proceeding.
When we revisited our questions, we realized the questions in our interview script were too numerous, close-ended, and focused on process. We reworked our script to focus on a few crucial, open-ended questions, the most important being - “Why do you donate?”
This change breathed new life into the project and gave us the material we needed to make our primary persona:
We also created two journey maps to help us visualize how she donated without our product. One journey map showed how she felt when trying to donate to a website she did not feel comfortable with, and the other shows her journey to a successful donation. Once we understood Anne’s basic needs, we analyzed the competition to find opportunities for our product.
Looking back to our nonprofits’ issues, we remembered they needed a way to connect with donors in a meaningful way in order to differentiate themselves. In order to create a connection with donors, we needed to provide a convenient and emotionally appealing way for donors to give online.
We broke the problem down into three areas we needed to design for:
We used paper prototypes for the first iterations of our product because we wanted to iterate quickly and put the emphasis on concept rather than fidelity. After several rounds of team and individual brainstorming, we created three prototypes:
AdvocateMe enabled users to browse and discover nonprofits and see friends’ donating activities.
We showed our designs to some potential users and they gave us some helpful feedback. They liked being able to see their friends’ favorite charities and view personalized suggestions, but found the round-up method of donating to be most practical. With their feedback in mind we moved on to creating one converged prototype.
We created the updated interactive Change prototype using Axure RP.
Onboarding:
The onboarding featured a basic sign-up process as well as an onboarding quiz to help curate suggested charities.
Home page/find a charity:
The first page provided a nudge and the convenience factor users needed to start donating. The charities at the top were suggestions based on the onboarding quiz, and the rest of the page was dedicated to helping users easily explore.
Change Wallet:
The wallet helped users find their favorite charities or ones they had donated to recently.
Donating to a Charity:
The charity page gave organizations the opportunity to showcase their cause and build the emotional connection users needed.
Messaging:
The emotional connection was continued in the messaging section, where charities could thanks their donors and show them the value of their donations.
Non-profit Dashboard:
We also created a dashboard for non-profits where they could view and manage their listings and donations.
After we created our converged design, we performed some usability testing to make sure the design was as convenient to use as we hoped.
The new design was well received; users said it was clear and easy to navigate. They liked the focus on nonprofits instead of friends, and the ability to find new organizations. One user said
“It’s like Pinterest for charities. You get to see so many types of good organizations”
At the end of the process, we presented our work to a panel of four UX and UI professionals for critique. Across the board, they approved of our choice to move forward with Change and praised our efforts to appeal to both donors and non-profits.
Click here to see the full prototype.
As I look back on the four weeks of this project, it’s gratifying and surprising to see how much I learned. I learned:
This first project served as a great platform for me to improve as a designer. It was fun to work on a team, and build a product from the ground up.
If you’ve already clicked through all my case studies, feel free to learn more about me. If you haven’t seen all three projects, start back at my Surplus Record case study.
